History, analysis, and unabashed gossip about the start of the American Revolution in Massachusetts.

J. L. BELL is a Massachusetts writer who specializes in (among other things) the start of the American Revolution in and around Boston. He is particularly interested in the experiences of children in 1765-75. He has published scholarly papers and popular articles for both children and adults. He was consultant for an episode of History Detectives, and contributed to a display at Minute Man National Historic Park.

Fairbanks will illustrate consequences of disobedience by Members of the House who voted NOT TO RESCIND THE CIRCULAR LETTER in 1768. To celebrate this act, Paul Revere produced the Sons of Liberty Bowl (to hold rum punch) and posed for his famous portrait (pictured holding a teapot) made by John Singleton Copley. Both bowl and portrait were made in 1768. They are displayed together in the newly opened American Arts Wing of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. . . .

The speaker, Jonathan Fairbanks, founded the Department of American Decorative Arts and Sculpture in 1971 and headed that department at the Museum of Fine Arts with an endowed curatorship until 1999 as The Katharine Lane Weems Curator (now emeritus). He is currently the Vice President for Research at http://www.artifact.com/ and continues work as a painter of landscapes, portraits and other subjects.

The Shirley-Eustis House, built by royal governor William Shirley in 1747 and home of Democratic-Republican governor William Eustis in 1819, is located on 33 Shirley Street in Roxbury.

The lecture starts at 1:30 P.M. Refreshments will be provided. The event is free, but donations for further historical educational programming will be welcome. Because of the volume of snow piled on the curbs, the site has arranged for parking space at the Ralph Waldo Emerson School at the end of Shirley Street. Also because of the snow, attendees should enter the Shirley-Eustis House through its rear entrance.

My talk will be titled “Washington’s First Spy Ring.” I’ll tell various stories about Gen. George Washington’s intelligence and counterintelligence efforts during his first months as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army. Those tales include:

[for the first time anywhere!] the name and subsequent career of the deserter who brought Washington plans of the British fortifications in July 1775.

Depending on time and what I discover between now and then, I may also tackle such questions as: How did intelligence from New Hampshire lead to the Battle of Bunker Hill? Did Henry Knox’s military career rest on his untold activities as a spy? And why did one of the cipher experts who helped unmask Church take a horse from Washington’s stable?

My talk is scheduled to begin at 6:00 P.M. It’s free, but because of limited seating, the site asks people to make reservations by phone or through this webpage.

You will receive this Letter by my Son George who accompanys your Lady, the Winter is so far advanced that I am fearfull she will have a very disagreeable Journey but I expect she will meet with every assistance. . . .

George is very desireous of remaining with you as long as you stay with the Army, this I have no objection against provided he can have some little part that will bear his expences, I am in hopes your will find him diligent in whatever duty is required of him…

That letter closed with the news that George’s brother Charles, younger by three years, had died eight days before “of an Inflamitary Fever after a short illness.”

So Gen. Washington, in the middle of the siege of Boston, was asked to find some paying work for his eighteen-year-old nephew. Young George was apparently skilled as a horseman, which might have been useful along the road from Virginia to Cambridge, but he could not have been experienced in business or travel. As I noted yesterday, he made so little impression in Philadelphia that the newspapers misidentified him.

George Lewis almost certainly lived in the John Vassall house after he arrived at Cambridge in December 1775. Over the next three months, he may have helped with administrative tasks at that headquarters. The latest editors of Gen. Washington’s papers suggest that Lewis wrote a 19 Feb 1776 letter to Christopher French, a captured British officer who sent the commander a ceaseless stream of complaints about his detention; apparently the unsigned copy on file is not in the handwriting of any known aides.

In March 1776, Lewis was commissioned as a lieutenant in the commander-in-chief’s guard. This unit was created to guard the headquarters papers and equipment. He served in that capacity until December, and then became a captain in the 2nd Continental Dragoons, seeing action in 1777.

Capt. Lewis spent a lot of 1778 away from his regiment. The general wrote him a chiding letter on 13 Feb 1779, so he resigned his commission and went home to Virginia to stay. George Lewis had evidently lost the desire to serve with his uncle “as long as you stay with the Army.”

(The thumbnail photo above shows Lewis’s gravestone, courtesy of waymarking.com which gives his full name as George Washington Lewis.)

Also on that northern leg of the journey, according to Helen Bryan’s Martha Washington: First Lady of Liberty (2002), was “Mrs. Warner Lewis, a relative of George’s.” Yet there’s no indication of why Mrs. Warner Lewis would have come along, nor anyone who recorded meeting her in Cambridge.

From the “Pennsylvania Gazette,” of November 29, it appears that Mrs. Washington and her party, which had been joined by Mrs. Gates, wife of General Gates, and Mrs. Warner Lewis, left Philadelphia on the twenty-seventh…

That book was in turn probably informed by a footnote in the 1889 edition of Washington’s writings, edited by Worthington Chauncey Ford, which quotes the 29 Nov 1775 Pennsylvania Gazette this way:

On Monday last, the Lady of His Excellency General Washington, the Lady of General Gates, J. Curtis, Esq; and Lady of Warner Lewis, Esq; set out for Cambridge.

But in fact that newspaper item reads:

On Monday last, the Lady of His Excellency General WASHINGTON, the Lady of General GATES, J. CURTIS, Esq; and Lady, and WARNER LEWIS, Esq; set out for Cambridge.

So the “Lady” in question was actually the wife of Curtis, and Warner Lewis was a man. Which offers the lesson of always relying on the earliest sources.

Except that the 1775 newspaper contained mistakes as well. “Curtis” was really Jack Custis, son of Martha Washington and her first husband. He and his wife Nelly accompanied his mother to Cambridge and back home in the spring.

And while there was a prominent Virginia planter named Warner Lewis related to the commander-in-chief, he didn’t travel with Martha Washington in 1775. Nor did his son of the same name. The newspaper printer misidentified Washington’s teen-aged nephew George Lewis.

And that’s what several authors say. But Gerry’s own letters suggest that he played only a minor part in the deciphering. His major role was obtaining a copy of the coded letter for Porter, a Massachusetts House representative from Hadley, and then spreading around the results.

On Sunday, 1 Oct 1775, Gerry started a letter to Continental Congress delegate Robert Treat Paine with the bad news about Church’s apparent treachery. The next day, Porter received a copy of the doctor’s document. Before Gerry mailed his letter to Paine on 3 October, he could add this confirming postscript:

the Letter (I am informed by Colo. [Joseph] Palmer) is decyphered; the Contents respect the State of the Army, the Quantity of powder now in our possession, what is expected & where, together with other Intelligence of a black & treacherous Nature.

Was Gen. Washington pleased with Gerry’s activity? Not at all. Gerry also sent Paine a copy of the deciphered letter, and Washington disliked having the Congress learn important news from anyone but him. He hadn’t written his own report on the Church affair yet.

Washington expressed his displeasure to his secretary Joseph Reed, who sent a note to James Warren, speaker of the Massachusetts House and thus in some way Gerry’s boss. On 5 October, Gerry responded to Reed somewhat hotly:

Col. Warren communicated your Letter which you sent him yesterday, affirming that General Washington was exceedingly affronted at my sending to Philadelphia a copy of Dr. Church’s Letter, that I ought to have known better than to have interfered in a matter in which I had not been consulted, to have seen ye impropriety of copying a Letter intrusted in confidence to another person & that I had just as much Right to have taken the original; all of which must appear highly injurious & if not supported by reason & grounded on Facts to be meer Invective, rendered the more unjustifiable by ye Manner in which it was conveyed.

With respect to ye Letter of Doctor Church’s referred to, hearing Sunday Morning that it was intercepted & wrote in cypher, & knowing the Colo. Porter was expert in decyphering, I desired him (as every friend of America had a Right to do) to offer to ye General his services for ye purpose mentioned, but did not apply in person, or by any other conduct whatever give you an opportunity of asserting as you ungenerously have that I had interfered in a Matter in which I had not be consulted. When ye Letter was sent here on Monday Evening Colo. Porter informed me of it, & shewed it without ever a suspicion that it was intrusted in Confidence as is unreasonably represented in your letter to Colo. Warren.

In consequence of which & being somewhat acquainted with decyphering I continue with him untill ye Business was finished agreeable to his desire, He had no objection to my taking a copy & ye person who wrote it having contrary to Directions taken a second copy it was immediately recovered & delivered to Colo. [Thomas] Mifflin who promised to hand it to ye General and take no other without his leave

I think it must now appear that ye copy of ye Letter came properly into my hands; that ye sending it to some particular Gentleman of ye Congress cannot effect ye Tryal of Doctor Church or with any propriety be considered an affront to ye General

Washington and Gerry—who was elected to the Continental Congress and then the Constitutional Convention—continued to work together, but I don’t think their relationship was ever warm. Gerry became an Anti-Federalist, then a Republican governor of Massachusetts and Vice President of the U.S. under Madison. (The bust of Gerry above sits in the U.S. Capitol.)

One of those men, Adam Maxwell, was Greene’s old Latin and mathematics tutor. The other was Godfrey Wenwood, a Newport baker who was holding onto a letter, written in cipher, that an old lover had asked him to pass on to British officials. Obviously, a coded communication to the enemy was a serious concern.

Wenwood’s former lover was living in “Little Cambridge,” the part of Cambridge on the south side of the Charles River, now Brighton. Washington sent Wenwood there to find out who had given her the ciphered letter. As James Warren, speaker of the Massachusetts House, described it, the baker’s mission was “to draw from the Girl, by Useing the Confidence She had in him, the whole Secret.”

Wenwood failed. (“She is a suttle, shrewd Jade,” Warren complained.) So Gen. Washington ordered the woman to be brought to headquarters. In 1851 Washington Irving wrote that Gen. Israel Putnam carried out this task in dramatic fashion:

Tradition gives us a graphic scene connected with her arrest. Washington was in his chamber at head-quarters, when he beheld from his window, General Putnam approaching on horseback, with a stout woman en croupe behind him. He had pounced upon the culprit.

The group presented by the old general and his prize, overpowered even Washington’s gravity. It was the only occasion throughout the whole campaign on which he was known to laugh heartily. He had recovered his gravity by the time the delinquent was brought to the foot of the broad staircase in head-quarters, and assured her in a severe tone from the head of it, that, unless she confessed everything before the next morning, a halter would be in readiness for her.

So far the tradition;…

This anecdote is consistent with other stories about Putnam. However, there’s no contemporaneous evidence for it, especially for the detail of Washington laughing in his own bedroom. After all, who could know that? Even Irving seems dubious, twice labeling the story “tradition.”

James Warren’s contemporaneous description of the woman’s arrest is more basic: “She was then Taken into Custody, and Brought to the Generals Quarters that Night. It was not till the next day that any thing could be got from her.” An officer in the Roxbury camp passed on a more detailed but less reliable rumor: the “Girl…after an Examination and 4 Hours under guard Confessd.”

The man who had given her the coded letter, the woman told Washington, was Dr. Benjamin Church, a leader of the Massachusetts Whigs, representative from Boston in the Massachusetts legislature, and Surgeon-General of the American army.

I wrote about the process of deciphering that letter back here in 2007. But since then I’ve learned some additional details.

The first appearance of this story in print was in a New England Historical and Genealogical Register article about Longfellow House published in 1871:

An anecdote is related of one of these [slaves], called Tonie Vassall, who, when Washington in 1775 took possession of Mr. Longfellow’s house, was found swinging on the gate. Learning that Tonie belonged to the place, the General, to set his mind at rest for his future, told him to go into the house and they would tell him what to do and give him something to eat.

Feeling the value of his freedom, Tonie inquired what would be the wages, at which Washington expressed surprise at his being so unreasonable at such a time as to expect to be paid.

Tonie lived to a great age, and when on one occasion he was asked what he remembered of Washington, said he was no gentleman, he wanted [a] boy to work without wages.

Decades later, the Cambridge historian Samuel F. Batchelder pointed out that Anthony Vassall was thought to be over sixty years old in 1775, and thus could not have been a “boy…swinging on the gate” that July. The long-lived former slave who told this anecdote about Washington, Batchelder wrote, must have been Tony’s son Darby Vassall (1769-1861).

Obviously, the transmission of that anecdote is hazy. Nonetheless, I think it contains a germ of truth because in nineteenth-century America George Washington was so revered that there was no advantage to making up stories that put him in a bad light—especially if one was a poor black man.

Given the risk in telling such an anecdote, Darby Vassall must have been strongly motivated to do so, most likely by his memory of a difficult encounter. Vassall’s unusual perspective on Washington is probably also why his contemporaries recalled and repeated the tale.

It’s also conceivable that the person who met Gen. Washington was the grown-up Tony Vassall, ready to work for wages, and the white chroniclers who recorded the story told by him and his family preferred to imagine him as a “boy.”

Either way, there’s no evidence in the headquarters accounts or Massachusetts records of Tony Vassall’s family being paid to work for Gen. Washington. But somebody maintained the Vassall fields, gardens, and orchards in those months, and documents show Tony Vassall and his family remained on the estate in the later 1770s. Most likely they received food and other necessities in exchange for their labor, and were treated as property belonging to the estate and therefore unpaid.

The point of that bill, originally introduced by the late Sen. Ted Kennedy and then taken up by Sen. John Kerry and Rep. Michael Capuano, is to highlight the site’s full significance in American history. The mansion, long known as “Longfellow House,” is recognized as important to the nation’s literary culture, but it was also a major military headquarters.

From mid-July 1775 to early April 1776, Gen. George Washington and his staff lived in the mansion. The Loyalist who had commissioned the building in 1759, John Vassall, had taken his family into Boston for the protection of the British army in September 1774. Washington spent a longer stretch in the Vassalls’ abandoned house than in any other Revolutionary War building but one: his headquarters in Newburgh, New York.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and his family were proud of their home’s past, installing pictures of the Washingtons and a bust of the general in the front hall. The poet felt a duty to welcome visitors who wanted to see the general’s headquarters, though such curiosity-seekers could themselves prove to be a curious bunch. For example, Longfellow wrote to his son Ernest on 5 Aug 1876:

A party of sight-seers has just been here from Illinois and elsewhere. They all called me “General,” and perhaps mistook me for General Washington, or “G. Washington,” as another visitor yesterday irreverently called the Father of his Country. The Centennial Year brings its inconveniences as well as its pleasures.

At the time, many Americans viewed Longfellow as a national treasure, as beloved for his poetry as a pop music star today, but not everyone recognized who led their tours. Octavius Brooks Frothingham reported in his profile of the poet:

he always did the honors of it with perfect urbanity, whether the caller knew anything about Washington or himself, and he did not forbear his jest when some remarkably obtuse specimen appeared,—as when one to whom he had shown the rooms asked in parting, “And who be you?” and another, not knowing what else to say, patronized the trees.

For the rest of the week Boston 1775 will look at stories from Gen. Washington’s period in the new Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site.

Regarding education, the material they distributed said, “Neglect and outright ill will have distorted the teaching of the history and character of the United States. We seek to compel the teaching of students in Tennessee the truth regarding the history of our nation and the nature of its government.”

That would include, the documents say, that “the Constitution created a Republic, not a Democracy.”

The material calls for lawmakers to amend state laws governing school curriculums, and for textbook selection criteria to say that “No portrayal of minority experience in the history which actually occurred shall obscure the experience or contributions of the Founding Fathers, or the majority of citizens, including those who reached positions of leadership.”

As Caitlin G. D. Hopkins noted, focusing on “the majority of citizens” should mean concentrating on the history of children, because they were the most numerous group in any society before the 1900s. If “majority” is defined along gender lines, that means women’s history. But these groups seem to be defining “majority” and “minority” only along ethnic and racial lines. Evidently they wish Tennessee schools to focus on Natives through the Revolution, and whites since statehood. (The same standard in some other states would mean studying black history for much of the ante-bellum period, since African-Americans comprised the majority of their populations.)

As to how the groups define “Republic” and “Democracy,” the article doesn’t say. Curiously, the groups’ other demands include being able to elect the state’s attorney general, which would be more democratic than the current system. Their respect for the considered decision of elected representatives—a hallmark of a democratic republic—is obviously limited to the laws they like.

The newspaper report quoted one particular activist on history education:

Fayette County attorney Hal Rounds, the group’s lead spokesman during the news conference, said the group wants to address “an awful lot of made-up criticism about, for instance, the founders intruding on the Indians or having slaves or being hypocrites in one way or another.

“The thing we need to focus on about the founders is that, given the social structure of their time, they were revolutionaries who brought liberty into a world where it hadn’t existed, to everybody — not all equally instantly — and it was their progress that we need to look at,” said Rounds, whose website identifies him as a Vietnam War veteran of the Air Force and FedEx retiree who became a lawyer in 1995.

Critics immediately pointed out that the founding generation did intrude on the Indians—that’s how we got the state of Tennessee. They did have slaves, despite praising liberty as a natural right. To be fair, Rounds doesn’t suggest those facts are “made-up,” only that the criticism is. Or something like that.

Naturally, I was most curious about Rounds’s views on American history. For example, in 2008 he wrote about the aftermath of the Civil War:

Reconstruction was the Marshall plan in reverse, a military occupation which concentrated on keeping all the experienced, competent public officials out of public affairs, to tax and restrict economic activity, and to maintain a monologue of hatred against the former rebels. Reconstruction was successful in driving the entire South deeper into poverty and chaos than it had been at the end of the war.

What is his understanding of the early republic? On 9 Apr 2009 Rounds published a letter in the Commercial Appeal that claimed “Obama Is Extinguishing Our Spark” [and, perhaps, blocking our precious bodily fluids] this way:

The Somali pirates’ attack on an American ship is an event that illustrates the conflict between the American character and President Barack Obama’s vision.

Americans have always been the exception: From our beginnings, rather than pay the ransom the European powers had been yielding to the Arab hijackers of that time, we chanted “millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute,” and Thomas Jefferson sent the Marines to release American hostages. . . .

In fact, from 1786 to 1801, U.S. governments paid the North African states protection money and ransom amounting to millions of dollars. Before becoming President and sending the Marines to Tripoli, as Secretary of State Jefferson had sent diplomats to negotiate treaties. Without a navy (which he opposed), the country couldn’t do much else.

The First Barbary War ended with the U.S. of A. still paying a much reduced ransom to redeem captives. From 1807 to 1815, North African states resumed seizing American crews, and the U.S. resumed paying ransoms. The Second Barbary War in 1815 finally ended the issue. Rounds’s summary of that history was incomplete, one-sided, and politicized.

Three days after that letter appeared, U.S. Navy forces acting on President Obama’s orders killed three pirates and rescued the captured captain. I haven’t found Rounds’s response to that development, but his dislike of Obama is an enduring theme in his public writing. In that April 2009 letter he falsely claimed, “Obama has made his mark by apologizing for all the achievements our independence, courage and persistence have bestowed on the world.” Rounds called Michelle Obama anti-American and totalitarian, and said the Obama administration as “inhabited by personalities whose expressed positions on vital American issues are unmistakably anti-American” (P.D.F. download). I believe the term for such statements is “an awful lot of made-up criticism.”

During the 2010 election, many “Tea Party” groups claimed to be interested only in lower taxes and smaller government. However, events like this show that members are happy to fight the “culture wars” and impose their values and prejudices on others wherever they can.

Thursday, January 20, 2011

Don Hagist of the British Soldiers, American War blog unearthed this item from the Cumbria Packet, a regional British newspaper, on 9 June 1778. It turns on the aftermath of the Battle of Saratoga, and how British politics uses the word “returned” as a synonym for “elected.”

Bon Mot.

A day or two after General [John] Burgoyne arrived, a large party being at dinner, the conversation turned upon the propriety, or impropriety, of his taking his seat in Parliament, previous to a court of inquiry:

“Poh, poh, (says a gentleman of the party) independent of his borough here, he has a right to take his seat in the House.”

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

In November, Bill West contacted me about a legal document describing a dispute between lawyer James Otis, Jr., and merchant Lewis Gray. Bill later posted a transcription of that 1771 writ at West in New England. In it Otis complained how:

the said Lewis Gray at said Boston in the eleventh day of this Instant November with Force of Arms between the Hours of five and seven o’clock Post meridiem with Force and arms broke and entered the said James Otis’s dwelling situate in Queen Street in said Boston being so enter’d being with Force as aforesaid, continued in the said House from the eleventh to the twelfth Instant six o’clock in the Forenoon & then & there between the Hour aforesaid with Force as aforesaid…assaulted, beat wounded and evil intreated the said James & other Enormities did then there commit & perpetrate…

The writ was served on 12 Nov 1771—within hours of the alleged assault.

Neither I nor Boston 1775 reader Jeff Purcell, who’s studying Otis, could find other sources about this incident. But here are some thoughts:

Lewis Gray wasn’t just any merchant. He was related to Otis, his younger sister Elizabeth having married the lawyer’s younger brother Samuel Allyne Otis.

In the early 1770s, Otis’s psychiatric difficulties had become inescapable. Sometimes he was lucid and capable of working, and at other times his family committed him to private institutions outside Boston.

One scenario that might have produced this document was that Otis began behaving oddly, Gray arrived at the Otis house to help control him, and Otis treated that as an assault, hastily creating this writ. The number of times the document mentions “Force”—it’s repetitive even by the standards of eighteenth-century legal language—suggests that it wasn’t written in full rationality. If the family bundled James Otis out of town shortly afterward and the authorities let his lawsuit lapse, that might explain why it never came to biographers’ attention. Of course, there are other possibilities.

If anyone has come across other documents mentioning this dispute between James Otis and Lewis Gray, give Bill West a buzz.

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

As Congress returns to work this week, one issue that historians are watching with interest involves the budget for the National Historical Publications and Records Commission. This commission has been part of the National Archives and Records Administration since 1934, and has been making grants since 1964 to preserve and publish non-federal records of historical value.

As far back as the Reagan administration, Republicans have been trying to eliminate the NHPRC. Earlier this year, House Republicans asked the public to vote on their website for federal programs to eliminate and the NHPRC came out near the top. Republican members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee have blocked NHPRC reauthorization legislation in the House by threatening to offer amendments that would gut the program. Without an authorization, the NHPRC might be vulnerable to elimination.

That House Republican website mentioned there is the YouCut page on Rep. Eric Cantor’s site. When I first heard about that, I thought it listed all the parts of the federal budget so that we citizens could weigh their value, rather like this New York Times webpage. Instead, it simply listed some programs Cantor and his party colleagues saw as unnecessary; the interactive gimmick invites visitors to choose which seemed most unnecessary that week.

In late October, the site hopped on the controversy over Juan Williams’s comments on Fox News to suggest cutting funding for National Public Radio. Apparently that funding hadn’t been unnecessary before. The election soon followed, and then the site stopped being updated. Presumably the original list of targets remains, but Cantor and his House colleagues, now in the majority, no longer seek input the same way.

At a hearing about the N.H.P.R.C. in June 2010 by the House subcommittee overseeing the National Archives, Rep. John Larson (D-Conn.), then the Speaker’s representative on the commission, argued that 90% of the commission’s funding creates or saves jobs. Historians and archivists testified about the value of the projects it funds.

The N.H.P.R.C. has been particularly generous toward projects to preserve and publish the papers of America’s Founders—ironically, the historical figures that the new House Republicans’ most vocal supporters say they revere. In December the commission announced:

However, the likely cuts threaten projects on lesser-known politicians of that generation, such as the unpublished papers of Robert Treat Paine. And I suspect that projects on other periods of American history might be at even greater risk. (Here are all the grants awarded in Massachusetts over time, showing the range.)

I think it makes sense to discuss what our federal government can pay for, given the economy, the deficit built up since 2001, and society’s other pressing needs. There might be an inefficient overlap between the N.H.P.R.C.’s grants and those from the National Endowment for the Humanities. However, I think any such discussion needs to be conducted on an open, honest basis, with all federal expenditures examined together. The N.H.P.R.C. is a very small part of the national budget, and may provide an unusually long-lasting benefit to our national culture.

Monday, January 17, 2011

The South Boston Historical Society and the Friends of the South Boston Library are hosting a talk at the end of the month called “Digging Up the Dot: The Archaeology of the Oldest House in Boston.”

Ellen Berkland, archeologist with the city’s Department of Conservation and Recreation, will discuss recent work near the James Blake House in Dorchester.

That house is the oldest structure in modern Boston, built about 1661. However, it’s been at its present location only since 1895, when the Dorchester Historical Society moved it about 1,200 feet to preserve it. The Blake House is also Berkland’s home.

Sunday, January 16, 2011

And speaking of Gen. Charles Lee, here’s one of my favorite anecdotes about him. On 21 Oct 1775, the Rev. Jeremy Belknap dined in Cambridge at the house of Thomas Mifflin, quartermaster general for the American army. The other guests included:

It’s testament to Lee’s forceful personality that Belknap’s journal entry about the dinner was almost entirely about him:

General Lee is a perfect original, a good scholar and soldier, and an odd genius; full of fire and passion, and but little good manners; a great sloven, wretchedly profane, and a great admirer of dogs,—of which he had two at dinner with him, one of them a native of Pomerania, which I should have taken for a bear had I seen him in the woods.

A letter which he wrote General [Israel] Putnam yesterday is a copy of his odd mind. It is, as nearly as I can recollect, as follows; being a letter of introduction of one Page, a Church [of England] clergyman: —

Hobgoblin Hall, Oct. 19, 1775.

Dear General,—

Mr. Page, the bearer of this, is a Mr. Page. He has the laudable ambition of seeing the great General Putnam. I therefore desire you would array yourself in all your majesty and terrors for his reception. Your blue and gold must be mounted, your pistols stuck in your girdle; and it would not be amiss if you should black one half of your face.

This Page is suspected by some to be a spy, as he has a plan of the lines, and is bound to England.

And of course one general should introduce a suspected spy to another.

I wonder if this Page was the same man who preached in Newport in March 1773 and got the Rev. Ezra Stiles all gossipy. He claimed to be a chaplain to the Countess of Huntingdon, who was financing Methodism back in Britain. I can’t find a record of that minister’s first name.

Saturday, January 15, 2011

Boston 1775 reader Robert C. Mitchell alerted me to this webpage from Harvard University. It says of Wadsworth House, once home of the college president and now office of the university marshal:

General George Washington, with the assistance of Henry Lee (then an officer in the Patriot Forces, and later father to General Robert E. Lee), set up his first headquarters in the house. From there, on July 3, 1775, Washington rode out to the Cambridge Common to take command of the Revolutionary troops. It is also said that the plans to oust King George from Boston took form in Wadsworth Parlor.

This description mixes up Charles Lee with Henry “Light-horse Harry” Lee. Charles was a former British army officer appointed major general of the Continental Army. He rode with Washington from Philadelphia to Cambridge, and spent some days sharing this house with the commander-in-chief.

Henry was a young man, still in his teens, whom Washington knew back in Virginia. By coincidence, both these Lees had visited Mount Vernon in late April, as Washington prepared for the Second Continental Congress. But in 1775 young Harry remained in Virginia, joining the Continental Army only in June 1776. He rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel by the end of the war.

The paragraph above also perpetuates the myth that Washington took command of the New England troops on the Cambridge common on 3 July 1775, a story usually set beneath the Washington Elm. Most scholars now agree that Gen. Artemas Ward handed over authority to Washington on the evening of 2 July in the college steward’s house around the corner (which is no longer standing).

Finally, it’s a stretch to say that the plans laid in Wadsworth House drove “King George” or his metonymic troops out of Boston. When Washington and Lee arrived in Cambridge, their immediate priorities were to strengthen American defenses and figure out just how many soldiers they had. Those tasks took weeks. Washington had no chance to plan an offensive until after he had moved out of this house into the abandoned Vassall mansion.

Friday, January 14, 2011

Last month brought a new time sink from Google Books, the Ngram Viewer, which searches the entire database for requested phrases. As an example, LibraryThing’s Jeremy Dibbell mentioned how @cliotropic had asked to compare terms for trousers (including the modern “jeans” and “pants”). I pushed that backwards, asking for a comparison of “breeches” (“britches,” the phonic spelling, produced negligible results), “pantaloons”, “trowsers” (the old spelling), “trousers”, and “pants.” Here’s the result.

The words “breeches” and “pants” have additional, non-sartorial meanings, of course. Nonetheless, it’s clear how the first word/garment became much less popular between 1780 and 1980, and the second much more. “Trowsers” overtook “pantaloons” and “pants” in the 1810s, and bowed to “trousers” in the 1830s.

However, I also found some glitches in the Ngram Viewer database. Its results are only as good as the input data. Here’s a comparison of the phrases “Boston Tea Party” and “destruction of the tea.” That shows some examples of the former phrase from before 1820, but clicking into the data reveals that those are simply volumes with the wrong publication date applied. With numbers so small, a few errors can really shift the lines. Still, we can see how the “Boston Tea Party” label overtook the older “destruction of the tea” around 1890, and eclipsed it since.

For books published in the 1700s, try putting an “f” where the “long s” should be: “Bofton” shows up more than “Boston.” Some Google Books scans have been adjusted for that typographical shift, and others haven’t.

All those grains of salt applied, Ngram Viewer is still a compulsive delight.

Who got the most press, Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, Thomas Jefferson, or John Adams? (Of course, there might be more than one John Adams.)

When did Americans start writing about “Sally Hemings”? (But note: That blip of early mentions is mostly misdated material. I can’t figure out a way to see examples of people writing about her without using her full name.)